The recent discussion of how to pronounce "Uyghur", and especially the treatment of the medial consonant, brought up the case of yoghurt/yogurt, which in French is "yaourt" — and today on the Omniglot Blog the Word of the Day is yaourter, "to yoghurt", which is said to be

a French word for the way people attempt to speak or sing in a foreign language that they don’t know very well. Often they mishear and misinterpret the word or lyrics and substitute them with familiar words.

Some of the comments on the Omniglot post suggest that the English equivalent is the noun mondegreen. I've never heard anyone verbing mondegreen, and a bit of web search doesn't turn up much except for the http://twitter.com/mondegreened (which I'm sorry to say belong to someone named "Julian", not "Ed"), and a post on "The mondegreening of America", and a few other things.

But it seems that the key thing about the French word is the nonsense imitation of another language, which is more like a specialization of doubletalk than a verbal equivalent of mondegreen.

Just for the story, in France, when we don't speak English and we want to imitate the sound, we call it "yaourter"(to yoghourt), the imitation sounds like a very nasal language, kind of like a baby crying. It mostly imitates the "cowboy" accent.

These examples do make it seem as if yaourter is a mode of vocal production, with any sense of "slip of the ear" being very much secondary. And it's not clear to me whether imitating the sound of another language is central to its meaning, or if it's rather something more like scat-singing, or sung double-talk, or something like that.

English has a lot of words for speaking or singing nonsensically, but I can't think of any word that refers specifically to nonsensical imitations of the speech of foreigners, although there's a long anglophone tradition of producing such imitations for the amusement of others.

48 Comments

Spectre-7 said,

That's rather odd, because I think UK English speakers consider French to be a highly nasalized language (see Brummie is beautiful). To imitate it, I'd nearly close my mouth, expand the upper nasopharynx as much as possible, and make a kind of "Hawng-de-hawng" noise through my nose.

[(myl) Although I can't come up with a reference at the moment, I recall some psychophysical experiments indicating that "nasal" as an ordinary-language descriptive term seems to mean something like "somehow odd or unexpected in timbre". This makes sense, because the acoustic effects of coupling the nasal cavities into the vocal resonance system are quite variable, adding pole-zero pairs at all sorts of different frequencies. ]

Yaourt (Yet AnOther User Repository Tool) is also a wrapper for the standard package manager (pacman) in Arch Linux, so in that context a yaourter would be someone who uses yaourt. Yaourt "imitates" pacman, and adds extra functionality.

To Noetica: there's a fair literature on "substitute OLD with/by NEW' for older "replace OLD with NEW" and "substitute NEW for OLD". I wrote to ADS-L in 2004:

… the use of "substitute" for "replace" is venerable; see MWDEU on "substitute", citing the OED (examples back to the 17th century), Fowler's rage over the usage, complaints from other usageists, a pile of examples (including one from Robert A. Hall, Jr. in American Speech (1951)), and the practice of M-W dictionaries since
Webster's Second (1934) to treat it as standard.

(There is, in addition, a much more recent variant "substitute OLD for NEW". For extended discussion of the three variants for "substitute", see David Denison's 2009 paper

Argument structure. In Günter Rohdenburg & Julia Schlüter (eds.), One language, two grammars? Differences between British and American English, 149-65. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Noetica said,

Thanks, Arnold Zwicky. Fascinating. And thanks also to David Denison, who has dropped in at Language Hat and contributed from his research, including Pete Townshend's definitive answer on what he meant by substitute in the song of that name (though much else remains uncertain in the lyrics, of course; O tempora, &c.).

Mr Punch said,

Seems to me that "mondegreen" is something entirely different – has nothing to do with foreign language. But there is some parallel to "barbarian," which derives from the ancient Greeks' representation of non-Greek speech as "bar bar bar."

@ Ray Girvan [and myl]
In the introduction to Folk Linguistics (2000) Nancy Niedzielski and Dennis Preston suggest that the folk term "nasal" is used to refer to inappropriate nasality, including both nasalized and denasalized speech. So if English and French speech differ in nasality, speakers of each language might call the other "nasal."

Aurore said,

So far I never head anyone use "yaourter", but I heard the expression "anglais yaourt" a few times.
(My mother "yaourte" or speaks in "anglais yaourt" when she tries to sing some English songs. "Like a candle in the wind" become something like "Lagaakadeuh izeu wiiii" – 'eu' being the French sound, similard to the 'i' in "bird".)

And it's not clear to me whether imitating the sound of another language is central to its meaning

I would say it is. It's different from misheard lyrics or scat. It's really the imitation of another language, even if the person that attempts such a thing doesn't know the language at all. (Well, if the person knows a bit the language, then it can be misheard lyrics).

Sometimes some people use that expression to say they speaks very badly English, too.

I realised I talked only about imitation of English, here, but that's because as far as I remember, I always heard that for that language. People don't "yaourt" Spanish or Italian. I guess that's because the word "yaourt" itself sounds a little bit English. (to untrained hears :) )

I'm a native French speaker too, and an English-to-French translator, and I know and use 'chanter en yaourt' to mean singing nonsensical phonemes or mangled French words to replace (usually English) foreign lyrics one cannot parse (or for a comical, mocking effect). I've been doing it a great deal in my youth, ever since I was a pre-pubescent Michael Jackson enthusiast in the eighties: I particularly remember one summer at camp, how one of our counselors taught us a string of mangled French words to sing in place of the lyrics to 'Beat it' to achieve a somewhat competent imitation to a non-anglophone ear.

I had never until now met the verbed form of the word, though, and 'yaourter' bothers me somewhat. I think I'll continue to call it 'chanter en yaourt' or 'faire du yaourt' (making yoghurt – the straight meaning could be misunderstood, of course, but the context renders the intended meaning clearly). Some verbings I like, and some I just… don't.

I would definitely say that the fact the original one is trying to imitate is foreign is a key concept in 'yaourt singing.'

CWV said,

Jean-Pierre Metereau said,

If it's using French words to sound like English, my favorite little book is "Mots d'Heures, Gousses, Rames." One example: "Et qui rit des cures d'Oc…" But the phrases actually mean something in French, although what they mean is usually not anything anyone would say.
On the nasal thing: It always puzzled me when I had just come to the States to hear Americans describing French as "nasal," whereas my father and mother described English as spoken through the nose. Eventually, I figured that "nasal," like "guttural," just meant that the speaker didn't like the sound of the language.

tablogloid said,

Tom Vinson said,

There's a nonsense version in English of "Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau", the Welsh national anthem, which is supposed to sound close enough to the Welsh text to be sung in public. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hen_Wlad_Fy_Nhadau.
The match looks a bit dubious to me, but I don't know Welsh.

J. W. Brewer said,

I agree that Swedish-Chefing sounds like a good analogy, which reminds me that many years ago I was surprised to learn while watching the Muppet Show dubbed into German that the Swedish Chef had been transformed into the Daenische Koch. [ae=a w/ umlaut] I've never gotten a satisfactory explanation about how the Swede-to-Dane substitution enhanced the humor value for a German-speaking audience. I assume the Koch's lines embodied a German approach to what would sound intrinsically comical/incoherent/foreign, but I can't actually recall (and haven't searched youtube for examples) if it sounded materially different than someone trying to speak German with the original "American" Swedish-Chef accent.

Another example seems to be "adenoidal" (Google "adenoidal tones"), which is used to mean, variously: upper-class, lower-class, having a blocked nose, strident, lacking in affect, whiney, indistinct, plaintive, gormless … in other words, just weird in some way.

jp said,

Reminds me of a fascinating set of youtube videos here, incited by a man who wanted to hear 'fake English'. If you look under 'related videos', there is a 54-second clip by a German user named "Elaphos" which, in my opinion, is the holy grail of yogurting.

mollymooly said,

Fortunately, John Wells has already done the heavy lifting on how well the Welsh national anthem works in Jenkins's version, pronounced with a South Wales accent. Scroll down, or search on the page for "Hen Wlad".

What he doesn't address is the extent to which the Jenkins version looks convincing in terms of how your mouth is seen to move, even when the wrong sound comes out. Supposedly it's quite good on that scale as well.

Aaron Davies said,

Jessica Banks said,

There's a food-related parallel in choral singing; it's closer to the "Hen Wlad" example than "yaourter," though, because it works best with English songs. I've heard a number of conductors recommend that, if a singer forgets the words to a song, they should sing the word "watermelon" to the tune. The vowels are broad enough that it'll look like they're still singing something meaningful without grating against the actual vowel that should be sung following the actual words, and it lacks any plosives or fricatives, voiced or otherwise, that would "punctuate" the flow of music at a wrong moment. I've been lucky enough not to have had to use it in concert situations, but then again, I've also never caught anyone using it as an audience member wise to the trick, so either nobody else is doing it either, or it works passably well.

Emily said,

Not to imitate the sound of a foreign language, but to imitate the sound of a crowd speaking when acting, our director would tell us to "rhubarb", i.e., say the word "rhubarb" over and over with varied inflection to imitate a conversation.

[…] English nor Italian, but the sounds are meant to resemble English. Linguist Mark Liberman wrote a facilitating post about this sort of thing over at Language Log discussing yaourter, the French word for an attempt […]